Sustainability criticism of Phoenix is wrong

A city named after a bird that periodically immolates itself in search of rebirth. The implication is one of impermanence and fragility; of an unstable thing always in transition.

This sense is not inaccurate. The Hohokams built a huge civilization here and then left. Phoenix was built atop their ruins. Maybe partly because of the name and heritage, Phoenix is frequently cited as being a poster child for "unsustainability."

In early October, Andrew Ross issued the latest indictment, "Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World's Least Sustainable City." The book represents the latest, longest and most articulate examination of Phoenix as a kind of colossal demographic mistake. But it is hardly the first.

In a 2006 radio interview on NPR, author Simon Winchester said Phoenix "should never have been built" because "there's no water there."

In 2008, Sustainlane.com rated Phoenix among the least-sustainable cities in the country because water comes from far away.

In 2010, the Natural Resources Defense Council found that Maricopa County was among the "most challenged" places in the U.S. for climate change. Their analysis calculated the delta between water use and rainfall within each county in the U.S.

And, in 2011, the Stockholm Environment Institute looked at Arizona water use, including agriculture, and found current patterns "unsustainable."

On top of those analyses, there are other negative views like Justin Hollander's new book "Sunburnt Cities," Ken Silverstein's piece on the "Tea Party in the Desert" in Harper's in July of 2010, and Richard Florida in the Atlantic way back in 2009, examining the future of American cities after the recession.

For those of us who live in and love Phoenix, the drumbeat seems relentless. At base, the assumption seems to be that it just cannot make sense for so many people to live in a hot, dry place where it doesn't rain much.

But why take water and hold it to a standard not applied to any other resource necessary to support a city? Should a city have to mine all its iron or copper within its boundaries? Or grow all its own food? Or manufacture everyone's clothing?

Cities are by definition concentrations of people supported by the resource base of a larger geographic area. Water is a resource like most others; it can be moved to where you need it.

To his credit, Ross' examination of Phoenix is much more complex and substantive than most of the simplistic screeds so apparently popular among journalists who live in wet, dreary places.

Indeed, Ross doesn't even make an effort to prove the thesis of his subtitle, saying, simply: "If (Phoenix) is not the world's least-sustainable city ... it is a very close contender, and, in any event, the title is not worth arguing over."

Running throughout Ross' book is a repeated reference to the egregious carbon footprint of central Arizona's urban dwellers. Nowhere does he actually attempt to quantify that footprint or actually compare it.

The Center for Climate Strategies has done so: Arizona emits about 14 metric tons of carbon dioxide per person per year: 35 percent below the U.S. average of 22 tons. Why? It takes less energy to cool than to heat, and the state doesn't have a lot of heavy industry.

Yet Phoenix is just too attractive a target. Surely, it is running out of water and must be rated unsustainable on that basis alone. The Morrison Institute's "Watering the Sun Corridor," was just issued to look at this issue.

The conclusion: There are tough choices ahead, but the water supply of the Sun Corridor is managed to deal with uncertainty and change, is remarkably resilient, and can handle several million more people even without new supplies. (Disclosure: I was the principal author of that study).

Sprawl is bad, and Phoenix is the poster child. But when the Brookings Institution examined the nation's growth from 1980 to 2000, it actually found that Phoenix chewed up far less land per dwelling unit built (0.148 acre) than the national average (2.0 acres).

So, based on the usual objective metrics, it's hard to make a case for Phoenix as "least sustainable."

But Phoenix, as Ross sees it, is a proxy for the lifestyle of the 20th-century American: a single-family home dweller with a lawn and a swimming pool, who drives alone in his car to work, consumes copious amounts of energy to exist in a narrow range of temperature, avoids walking at all costs, needs huge and complex infrastructure to survive, but distrusts every aspect of the government that built him that infrastructure.

This critique slams a lifestyle more than an individual city, but Phoenix is certainly culpable. Ross sees the city named after a pyrotechnic bird as particularly blameworthy because of an almost religious devotion to the industry of growth. More people consuming more stuff has been the American measure of success.

This is a legitimate indictment of most of this nation during the past century, and blaming Phoenix as the worst seems an unfair way of letting others off the hook.

At least Ross doesn't simply write Phoenix off as "unsustainable" because it is in a desert. Sustainability is not so simple a concept as to be measured by rainfall or the length of a canal. Sustainability is all about complex systems, multiple choices and managing through challenges.

Andrew Ross' most trenchant criticism is when he looks at Phoenix's politics, and in particular the city's emblematic libertarian bent. The significant challenges of sustainability are met only through collective action. You cannot exist in a hot, arid, challenging environment as a rugged individualist.

The lesson of central Arizona's water challenge is that it has been dealt with again and again -- by government action. The real measure of how sustainable a place is must examine how it responds to challenges.

Arizona has had a pretty strong history of banding together and using government to make it possible to live here. Think about our dams and canals, interstate highways, air travel, military bases and defense contracting. Whether that faith in collective action still exists is a pretty legitimate question in today's world.

It is understandable that Phoenix strikes people as a fragile place. But, at the end of the day, the verdict of sustainability is not about geography. It's about politics.

Before we brand Phoenix as "the world's least-sustainable city," we have to figure out how to rate political foresight and willpower. Andrew Ross hasn't tried to do that, but he's at least advanced the dialogue to a more complex analysis. If only he hadn't picked that subtitle.

Grady Gammage Jr., an attorney, author and land-water expert, is a senior research fellow at Morrison Institute for Public Policy, a nonpartisan center for research, analysis and public outreach at Arizona State University.